Segregation and all the other ills of the day had nothing to do with the challenges faced by "colored" people. They just needed to be smarter and work harder.
Putting aside that there are various degrees of poverty, I will just congratulate you and your friends. But, studies show that economic mobility is far more difficult than in the past and more difficult in the U.S. than in many western European nations.
The severe and worsening income and wealth stratification of the past few decades is no accident. There are structural problems with our economy. That a relative few can overcome this to some degree neither disproves nor mitigates that fact.
It isn't a "lack of economic freedom" that makes the poor get screwed by shitty jobs and all the fees tacked onto poor-people services, it's the cottage industry that's sprung up around screwing the poor. The poor have little to no political power (and they wouldn't have time to exercise it, juggling their three part-time minimum wage jobs), so there's very few people actually looking out for them.
It's funny, when we do peel back regulations, and the poor get screwed further, these myth-of-overregulation people never reflect on that. They never stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the poor are getting screwed even further because it isn't regulations that are hurting them in the first place.
Whatever it is, you seem to suggest that the success of India and China has nothing to do with trade agrements. Nothing to do with currency manipulation. Nothing to do with technology. Nothing to do with the outsourcing of manufacturing and other jobs to these low wage countries. Just increase "economic freedom" (what does that even mean exactly) and voila!
And, why is it that even with regulation and suppressed "economic freedom", U.S. corporations realized record profits, while unemployment remained high, and wages low? Exactly whose "economic freedom" is being decreased here? How is it that we can pay CEOs so many times the average worker's salary even while that CEO is driving the company over a cliff? Meanwhile, full-time workers find themselves below the poverty line? No problems there, right? It's the workers' fault. Or perhaps it's the regulations, but which regulation(s)?
I'm just not following your argument. Are you saying there are no structural problems with our economy that cause the poor to be disenfranchised? And, what redistribution have I advocated, to which you are taking exception?
Exactly!
Food, shelter, access to medical care, these are the basics of human life, and no one should go without them.